Margarete Bohme

The Diary of a Lost One [original German title: Tagebuch einer Verlorenen]

New York: The Stuyvesant Press Publishers, 1908. Very Good. Item #47678

New York: The Stuyvesant Press Publishers, 1908. Reprint, following the American first edition from Hudson Press. Octavo; forest green cloth stamped in black; 319pp. No dust jacket. Light wear to boards; bumping; spotting to cloth sizing; binding sound; off-setting to endpapers, else unmarked; a Very Good copy.

Now generally agreed to be a work of fiction, "Tagebuch einer Verlorenen" was a sensation when originally published in Germany in 1905. Purporting to be the diary of a young woman forced by her circumstances into a life of prostitution, the work had sold 1,200,000 copies by the end of the 1920s and was called by one scholar, "Perhaps the most notorious and certainly the commercially most successful autobiographical narrative of the early twentieth century," (Gertensberger, p. 108). Typical of moralizing reviews upon this edition's release, the San Francisco Call Bulletin called it "a horrible book but a wonderful lesson." Basis for the 1929 film "Diary of a Lost Girl" starring Louise Brooke and directed by G.W. Pabst; uncommon in retail.

References:

Gerstenberger, "Truth to Tell: German Women's Autobiographies and Turn of the Century Culture," University of Michigan Press, 2000

San Francisco Call Bulletin, "Books Reviewed," Sunday August 30, 1908, page 7.

Price: $100.00